[nocturnial]

I think you're confused because you heard a lot of different goals of the sanctions.

For me, the sanctions aren't about stopping the current war, but about stopping future wars.

In your analogy...

Rusty doesn't know how to make a baseball bat. We supplied rusty with baseball bats because we thought he would use it to play baseball games. Instead he used it to threaten his class mates. We took that supply of baseball bats away from him because we can and don't want him to threaten Suzy like he did with Ursula. It doesn't matter to me what Rusty wants to trade to get those bats.

I don't supply bats or anything that can be traded to bats to Rusty in order to protect Suzy and I'll give Ursula whatever she needs to protect herself.

Sincerely,

Amanda

[tpoacher]

This is all fine and dandy, and I'm sure everyone means well, but it still doesn't explain why I'm the one left without money, or why I'm expected to be blaming "Rusty" instead of "Amanda" who actually took the money he left me.

It's more like "Dear George, thank you for donating this money to our cause that I'm sure you agree with or else. Sincerely Amanda."

Not sure how I'd feel about that, regardless of how I feel about Ursula, Suzy, Natalie, Faye, Denise, Izzie, Romina, Molly, Trudy, or any of the girls in my class.

[nocturnial]

If you're talking about inflation, we had a multi-year pandemic in which the western governments gave aid to struggling businesses, inoculated their population for free, supply chains were severaly disrupted, etc...

The war in Ukraine didn't cause the inflation (I think), although I admit it probably made it worse. I think it was the other way around. The prospect of inflation caused the war in Ukraine. Russia thought with all the challenges we would face, we wouldn't react to an invasion in Ukraine.

I'm not an expert in macro economics, so do you think there wouldn't be an inflation if Russia didn't invade Ukraine?